Thomas was in Aberdeen in January to speak at the Wheat Growers’ annual meeting at the Dakota Event Center.

After his visit, I heard from several readers who were interested in reading his column in the paper.

Thomas can add the American News to his list of subscribing dozens and dozens of others.

His column replaces Thomas Sowell on Tuesdays.

¿ We’ve had a lot of feedback to changes we’ve made to the design of our obituaries page.

Several readers have said they don’t like the new look; we have heard from some who do like it.

One reader told me the type looks smaller (it isn’t; the type is the same size as always). I’ve heard that the width of the newspaper columns makes the obituaries harder to read (we are using the same column width as all of our inside news and sports pages). One person even thought the paper itself is narrower (we did not change the size of the paper).

Many of these concerns about the looks of the obituaries are related more to the change. They are not necessarily better or worse for readers, just different.

The one-column formatting of obituaries is very common in newspapers across the state and around the country. It will take readers a little time to get used to the new look, but it will happen.

Another concern is the obituaries jumping from one column to the next. That is certainly a change from the way they’ve been done before. We are learning to better design those pages every day and avoid some of the pitfalls.

There are several reasons behind the changes. We are now putting the obituaries in the lefthand corner of the page, rather than starting in the middle. We can fit more obituaries onto one page and with better organization.

In addition, we are making some improvements inhouse to the way obituaries are processed to get into the paper. That necessitated a layout change.